Skip to main content
Log in

Beyond party: ideological convictions and foreign policy conflicts in the US congress

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Politics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Recent work finds evidence that partisan calculations, not ideological preferences, drive congressional decisions on foreign policy. While legislators support the wars launched by their party’s presidents, they often oppose those by the other party’s presidents. However, it is unclear whether such partisan calculations are limited to a narrow set of security votes or whether they are part of a broad pattern of foreign policymaking in Congress. To examine the importance of partisan versus ideological motivations, we examine the substantive contributions legislators make to, and the votes they cast on, foreign policy measures. Specifically, we collect sponsorship and voting data on amendments that allow Congress to restrict presidential spending on defense programs and foreign aid. In analyzing data from 1971 to 2016, we find that ideology is the most consistent factor that determines whether legislators propose and support spending limits on security-related bills.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. We use the term partisan warfare here rather than the term partisan polarization, because in this project we examine the conflict between the two congressional parties—not the ideological distance between them. See Theriault (2013).

  2. For additional studies on the importance of partisanship in foreign policymaking, see Meernik (1993), Prins and Marshall (2001), Kupchan and Trubowitz (2007), Souva and Rohde (2007), Peake et al. (2012).

  3. Of course, legislators follow partisan cues in most policy areas, since no member has sufficient expertise to develop independent views on the vast range of issues that Congress considers. But partisan cues are especially powerful in the realm of foreign policy. Because foreign policy often concerns classified matters, alternative cue-givers—such as interest groups—cannot provide the kind of informed guidance to legislators that they do on most domestic issues. Bendix and Quirk (2020) make a similar point about congressional decisions on intelligence policy.

  4. Some observers argue that Donald Trump’s presidency challenges this point, since he flip-flopped often on foreign policy without apparent political cost (see McDonald et al., 2019). But his low approval ratings across four years suggest that he suffered some political blowback for his unpredictability and sudden policy reversals.

  5. In considering foreign policy ideologies, we focus on the hawk-dove dimension and ignore the internationalist-isolationist dimension. We do so because existing studies show that the hawk-dove dimension captures more than 90% of foreign policy voting after WWII (Jeong, 2018; Jeong and Quirk, 2019). Furthermore, our data do not cover the Trump presidency, the period during which the internationalist-isolationist dimension is likely to be again salient.

  6. Both the House and the Senate follow a two-step process for funding government operations. First, the authorizing committees—such as the House and Senate Armed Services committees—draft authorization bills that create, modify, or continue federal policies and programs. Second, after the authorization bills have passed, the Appropriations committees review the authorized funding levels for the policies and programs, and then develop appropriations bills that either approve or modify those levels (Oleszek, 2014, pp. 47–60).

  7. Although the most ambitious riders against the Iraq War failed to pass, ones that dealt with the treatment of detainees did become law.

  8. The House restricted the ability of members to offer limitation riders in 1983 and, again, in the mid-1990s, but our data do not show obvious declines in riders offered because of those rule changes. See Fig. 1.

  9. However, in a separate analysis, we add the foreign aid riders that relate to military support in our defense rider sample, since both likely reflect dovish policy efforts. This analysis produces similar substantive results to the findings reported in Table 1 of this paper. See the online appendix for a full discussion of this robustness check.

  10. We exclude amendments that increase or restore spending for specific or overall programs from the analysis. Only amendments that prohibit, reduce, or attach conditions for spending are included in our data.

  11. Jeong (2018) has generated hawk-dove estimates for all members of Congress using only votes that concern defense and foreign policy. Although these hawk-dove estimates are generally appropriate for studies on Congress and foreign policy (see, e.g., Bendix and Jeong, 2020; Jeong and Quirk, 2019), they do not serve our purposes here for two reasons. First, in order to explore the relative influence of ideology versus partisanship among members, we need to explore how legislators respond to presidents based on their partisan affiliation. To do so, we need to include control variables that account for a president’s ideology to see the extent to which party drives sponsorship decisions by legislators. Only NOMINATE provides the estimated ideological locations of presidents that are directly comparable with those of Congress members. Second, Jeong’s hawk-dove estimates are partly derived from the same roll call data that we examine in this study, raising concerns of built-in correlation between our independent and dependent variables.

  12. The average correlation coefficient between the estimates of foreign policy positions by Jeong (2018) and the first-dimension estimates of the NOMINATE model is 0.91 for the period covered in our data.

  13. The eight panels are the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Senate Appropriations subcommittees on defense and foreign operations, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House Armed Services Committee, and the House Appropriations subcommittees on defense and foreign operations.

  14. We use the number of terms in the House and the number of years in the Senate to track the seniority of members. Member-level data, such as committee assignment and veteran status, are from Bendix and Jeong (2020); much of these data are also available at Charles Stewart’s website: http://web.mit.edu/17.251/www/data_page.html.

  15. Admittedly, the Washington consensus over Cold War containment policy may have already been breaking down during the Ronald Reagan presidency (see, e.g., Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007, 2010; compare Chaudoin et al., 2010). But, by current standards, party conflict over security questions was rather muted back then.

  16. To implement Bayesian estimation, we assigned non-informative priors. We used WinBUGS, and we checked the convergence using the Gelman-Rubin statistics and traceplots. All the Gelman–Rubin statistics were close to 1, suggesting convergence.

  17. The significance of the Cold War variable, coupled with the insignificance of all coefficients at the Poisson process, provides further corroboration.

  18. This model is also estimated using Bayesian estimation. We assigned non-informative priors, used WinBUGS, and checked the convergence using the Gelman–Rubin statistics and traceplots. All the Gelman–Rubin statistics were close to 1, suggesting convergence.

  19. Note that the measures of uncertainty (i.e., the credible intervals) are small because we have set all indicator variables and fixed effects to 0.

  20. For a Senate foreign aid rider, no change in ideology can achieve such a change in predicted probabilities because the ideology variable is not statistically different from 0.

  21. For a related discussion, see Holman and Lantis (2020) on the effects of intraparty factionalism in congressional foreign policymaking.

References

  • Adler, E.S., and J.S. Lapinski. 1997. Demand-Side Theory and Congressional Committee Composition: A Constituency Characteristics Approach. American Journal of Political Science 41 (3): 895–918.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Banks, W.C., and P. Raven-Hansen. 1994. National Security Law and the Power of the Purse. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baum, M.A., and P.B.K. Potter. 2015. War and Democratic Constraint: How the Public Influences Foreign Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bendix, W., and G. Jeong. 2020. Gender and Foreign Policy: Are Female Members of Congress More Dovish than Their Male Colleagues? Political Research Quarterly 73 (1): 126–140.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bendix, W. and P.J. Quirk, 2020. The Challenges of Deliberating Surveillance Policy. Unpublished manuscript. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia.

  • Calhoun, F.S. 1993. Uses of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carter, R.G., and J.M. Scott. 2009. Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Chaudoin, S., H.V. Milner, and D.H. Tingley. 2010. The Center Still Holds: Liberal Internationalism Survives. International Security 35 (1): 75–94.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chuzi, A. 2020. Defense Lawmaking. Columbia Law Review 120 (4): 995–1034.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carcelli, S.P. 2020. Congressional Polarization and Limitation Riders in Foreign Aid Appropriations. Paper presented at the workshop on Domestic Polarization and U.S. Foreign Policy;12 November, Heidelberg University, Germany.

  • Cox, G.W. and M.D. McCubbins. 2005. Setting the Agenda: Responsible Party Government in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Cambridge University Press.

  • Cowen, T., and D. Sutter. 1998. Why Only Nixon Could Go to China. Public Choice 97 (4): 605–615.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cukierman, A., and M. Tommasi. 1998. When Does It Take a Nixon to Go to China? American Economic Review 88 (1): 180–197.

    Google Scholar 

  • Curry, J.M. 2019. Knowledge, Expertise, and Committee Power in the Contemporary Congress. Legislative Studies Quarterly 44 (2): 203–237.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Doherty, D., C.M. Dowling, and M.G. Miller. 2016. When Is Changing Policy Positions Costly for Politicians? Experimental Evidence. Political Behavior 38 (2): 455–484.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Drutman, L., and P.C. Hanson. 2019. Does Regular Order Produce a More Deliberative Congress? Evidence from the Annual Appropriations Process. In America Govern Itself?, ed. F.E. Lee and N. McCarty, 155–180. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Grofman, B., R. Griffin, and G. Berry. 1995. House Members Who Become Senators: Learning from a “Natural Experiment” in Representation. Legislative Studies Quarterly 20 (4): 513–529.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Grynaviski, J.D. 2010. Partisan Bonds: Political Reputations and Legislative Accountability. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hall, R.L. 1996. Participation in Congress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hanson, P.C. 2017. The Endurance of Nonpartisanship in House Appropriations. In Congress Reconsidered, 11th ed., ed. L.C. Dodd and B.I. Oppenheimer, 285–310. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hendrickson, R.C. 2002. The Clinton Wars: The Constitution, Congress, and War Powers. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hersman, R.K.C. 2000. Friends and Foes: How Congress and the President Really Make Foreign Policy. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holman, P. and J.S. Lantis. 2020. Foreign Policy Free Agents: How Lawmakers and Coalitions on the Political Margins Help Set Boundaries for U.S. Foreign Policy.” Paper presented at the workshop on Domestic Polarization and U.S. Foreign Policy;12 November, Heidelberg University, Germany.

  • Holsti, O., and J. Rosenau. 1996. Liberals, Populists, Libertarians, and Conservatives: The Link Between Domestic and International Affairs. International Political Science Review 17 (1): 29–54.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Howell, W., and J. Pevehouse. 2007. While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jeong, G. 2018. Measuring Foreign Policy Positions of Members of the US Congress. Political Science Research and Methods 6 (1): 181–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jeong, G., and P.J. Quirk. 2019. Division at the Water’s Edge: The Polarization of Foreign Policy. American Politics Research 47 (1): 58–87.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knecht, T., and M.S. Weatherford. 2006. Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making. International Studies Quarterly 50 (3): 705–727.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kraus, C. 1993. Senators Seek Early Pullout of U.S. Troops from Somalia. New York Times, 12 October, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/12/world/senators-seek-early-pullout-of-us-troops-from-somalia.html. Accessed 23 February 2021.

  • Krehbiel, K. 1991. Information and Legislative Organization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Kriner, D.L. 2010. After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Kupchan, C.A., and P.L. Trubowitz. 2007. Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States. International Security 32 (2): 7–44.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kupchan, C.A., and P.L. Trubowitz. 2010. The Illusion of Liberal Internationalism’s Revival. International Security 35 (1): 95–109.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lantis, J.S. 2019. Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

  • Lee, F.E. 2009. Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the U.S. Senate. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

  • Lee, F.E. 2015. How Party Polarization Affects Governance. Annual Review of Political Science 15: 261–282.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Levitt, S.D. 1996. How Do Senators Vote? Disentangling the Role of Voter Preferences, Party Affiliation, and Senator Ideology. American Economic Review 86 (3): 425–441.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, V. 2017. The President and the Parties’ Ideologies: Party Ideas about Foreign Policy Since 1900. Presidential Studies Quarterly 47 (1): 27–61.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lugar Urges Bush to Change Course Soon in Iraq. 2007. CNN, 26 June. https://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/06/25/iraq.lugar/. Accessed 23 February 2021.

  • Matthews, D.R., and J.A. Stimson. 1975. Yeas and Nays: Normal Decision-Making in the U.S. House of Representatives. New York: Wiley.

  • McCormick, J.M., and E.R. Wittkopf. 1990. Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947–1988. Journal of Politics 52 (4): 1077–1100.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McDonald, J., S.E. Croco, and C. Turitto. 2019. Teflon Don or Politics as Usual? An Examination of Foreign Policy Flip-Flops in the Age of Trump. Journal of Politics 81 (2): 757–766.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mead, W.R. 2001. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meernik, J. 1993. Presidential Support in Congress: Conflict and Consensus on Foreign and Defense Policy. Journal of Politics 55 (3): 569–587.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Monroe, N.W., and G. Robinson. 2008. Do Restrictive Rules Produce Nonmedian Outcomes? A Theory with Evidence from the 101st–108th Congresses. Journal of Politics 70 (1): 217–231.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nincic, M., and J. Ramos. 2010. Ideological Structure and Foreign Policy Preferences. Journal of Political Ideologies 15 (2): 119–141.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oleszek, W.J. 2014. Congressional Procedure and the Policy Process, 9th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peake, J.S., G.S. Krutz, and T. Hughes. 2012. President Obama, the Senate, and the Polarized Politics of Treaty Making. Social Science Quarterly 93 (5): 1295–1315.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Poole, K.T. 2007. Changing Minds? Not in Congress! Public Choice 131 (3–4): 435–451.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Poole, K.T., and H. Rosenthal. 2007. Ideology and Congress. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • Prins, B., and B. Marshall. 2001. Congressional Support of the President: A Comparison of Foreign, Defense, and Domestic Policy Decision Making during and after the Cold War. Presidential Studies Quarterly 31 (4): 660–679.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quirk, P.J., W. Bendix, and A. Bächtiger. 2018. Institutional Deliberation. In The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy, ed. A. Bächtiger, J. Dryzek, J. Mansbridge, and M. Warren, 273–299. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schultz, K.A. 2005. The Politics of Risking Peace: Do Hawks or Doves Deliver the Olive Branch? International Organization 59 (1): 1–38.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Smith, S.S. 2007. Party Influence in Congress. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Souva, M., and D. Rohde. 2007. Elite Opinion Differences and Partisanship in Congressional Foreign Policy, 1975–1996. Political Research Quarterly 60 (1): 113–123.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Theriault, S.M. 2013. The Gingrich Senators: The Roots of Partisan Warfare in Congress. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Tiefer, C. 2006. Can Appropriation Riders Speed Our Exit from Iraq? Stanford Journal of International Law 42 (2): 291–342.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to William Bendix.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 21 kb)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bendix, W., Jeong, GH. Beyond party: ideological convictions and foreign policy conflicts in the US congress. Int Polit 59, 827–850 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00370-9

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-021-00370-9

Keywords

Navigation